the present investigation was designed to study the production and comprehension of specific means for information highlighted by advanced iranian learners of english as a foreign language. the study focused on the discourse-pragmatically motivated variations of the basic word order such as inversion, pre-posing, it- and wh-clefts. after taking the nelson test, a homogeneous group was settled. ...

Much of the research on sentence processing has focused on discovering universal principles to explain parsing preferences. Recent cross-linguistic work, however, suggests that processing is sensitive to distributional information about individual languages. Along these lines, we explore a constraint-based approach to processing, in which cross-linguistic variation is explained by the interacti...

This study explored Wh question comprehension in Hebrew-speaking children with syntactic SLI (S-SLI), comparing which and who questions and subject and object questions. The participants were 14 Hebrew-speaking children with S-SLI aged 9;3-12;0, and the control group included 25 typically developing children aged 9;1-10;0. The study used two binary picture selection tasks. The results indicated...

An auditory sentence comprehension task investigated the extent to which the integration of contextual and structural cues was mediated by verbal memory span with 32 English-speaking six- to eight-year-old children. Spoken relative clause sentences were accompanied by visual context pictures which fully (depicting the actions described within the relative clause) or partially (depicting several...

This study explored Wh question comprehension in Hebrew-speaking children with syntactic SLI (S-SLI), comparing which and who questions and subject and object questions. The participants were 14 Hebrew-speaking children with S-SLI aged 9;3-12;0, and the control group included 25 typically developing children aged 9;1-10;0. The study used two binary picture selection tasks. The results indicated...

Using referential context in language (e.g., saying “blue pen” when two different-colored pens are visible) makes communication efficient. But it is still unclear which general cognitive processes support the use of context in conversation. Research on pragmatic use in language implicates working memory and inhibitory control; however, no studies have shown evidence of a shared cognitive mechan...

Recent advances in probabilistic pragmatics have achieved considerable success in modeling speakers' and listeners' pragmatic reasoning as probabilistic inference. However, these models are usually applied to population-level data, and so implicitly suggest a homogeneous population without individual differences. Here we investigate potential individual differences in Theory-of-Mind related dep...